Katherine Smith has always written with acute sensitivity to the beauties and sorrows of the world, yet in the poems of Secret City she reaches new and deeper registers of tender attentiveness. She is a noticer of the highest order, recording the minute and the momentous: “I like / how quiet the trees are, not to keep a secret / or to forget but because quiet is all they are.” Smith’s poems generate unforgettable connections between vision and experience, recognizing the contoured interiors of illness and alienation alongside the pleasures of a sizzling omelet while thinking of the blue and white chair where poems are written. The centerpiece of Secret City is a lyric sequence set in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, during and after World War II, examining the life of a young Jewish girl searching for her way in the Southern Baptist Bible Belt. These new poems prove that Katherine Smith is a worthy heir to the legacies of Marilou Awiakta and George Scarbrough, the original Secret City master-poets.—Jesse Graves, author of Merciful Days and Said-Songs: Essays on Poetry and Place

I have long admired Katherine Smith’s finely tuned, lush work and her discipline as a writer. Her vision continues to expand and deepen in this third collection, Secret City. Persecution, war, and its haunting aftermath come in various forms. But redemption is nigh in this work, the prayer of embrace and belonging answered by red sumac, willow, camellia, chestnut pony. The speakers are indeed born again: “I’m going to live twice, / once baptized in the Clinch River, // once with the wild geese that fly over Norris Dam / toward the Cumberland Plateau and never look down.”—Linda Parsons, author of Candescent and This Shaky Earth

Secret City is the perfect title for Katherine Smith’s latest collection of poems. Literally, it is the name for Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where atomic bombs were made in secret during World War II. This is the setting for many of her poems inspired by her rel...